When I stood by my dead mother’s side once the hospice staff had readied her for her coffin I knew then there is an absolute silence in death. At that time of night the hospice was readying itself for sleep but the silence was more than that. The noisy endless workings of the body, including my Mum’s, was silent and somehow that silence spread out and out and out right to the edge of all known things. It’s a final silence in which the busy living simply have to stop talking (there is nothing more to be said) but the ultimate silence in death is also concrete and physical.
Why can we not simply stand still and honour it? My feeling is it’s because the silence of death is unbearable in our noisy high tec society. Personally I prefer those societies that insist the body be buried before sunset, or that the windows be closed and blackened giving visual permission for people not to have to interact with one another for a while. It’s one of those rare times when I’d actually like the occasion to be hedged around with rituals and protocols so that the participants don’t have to get embroiled in decisions, dates, places, who to contact, visit, telephone etc. To let the ineffable, majestic, indubitable silence of death settle in before the inevitably noisy wake begins.
